Marcel Duchamp (1887 – 1968)
French artist who became an American citizen in 1955.
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I just like - just breathing. I like breathing better than working.
They say any artist paying six dollars may exhibit. Mr.Richard Mutt (= Duchamp, ed.) sent in a fountain. Without discussion this article disappeared and never was exhibited. What were the grounds for refusing Mr. Mutt’s fountain:
1. Some contented it was immoral, vulgar.
2. Others, it was plagiarism, a plain piece of plumbing.
Now, Mr. Mutt’s fountain is not immoral, that is absurd, no more than a bath tube is immoral. It is a fixture that you see every day in plumber’s show windows. Whether Mr. Mutt with his own hands made this fountain or not has no importance. He CHOSE it He took an ordinary article of life, placed it so that’s its useful significance disappeared under the new title (‘The Richard Mutt Case’ he made in 1917, ed.) and point of view, created a new thought for that object. As for plumbing, that is absurd. The only works of art America has given are her plumbing and her bridges.
I have forced myself to contradict myself in order to avoid conforming to my own tastes.
In 1913 I had the happy idea to fasten a bicycle wheel to a kitchen stool and watch it turn. A few months later I bought a cheap reproduction of a winter evening landscape, which I called ‘Pharmacy’ after assign two small dots, one red and one yellow, in the horizon. In New York in 1915 I bought at a hardware store an snow shovel on which I wrote 'In advance of the broken arm'. It was around that time that the word ‘Readymade’ came to mind to designate this form of manifestation.
The spectator experiences the phenomenon of transmutation; through the change from inert matter into a work of art, an actual transubstantiation has taken place… …All in all, the creative act is not performed by the artist alone; the spectator brings the work into contact with the external world by deciphering and interpreting its inner qualifications and thus adds his contribution to the creative act.
I wanted to kill art for myself… …a new thought for that object.
Let us consider two important factors, the two poles of the creation of art: the artist on one hand, and on the other the spectator who later becomes the posterity; to all appearances the artist acts like a mediumistic being who, from the labyrinth beyond time and space, seeks his way out to a clearing.
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